Thursday, August 8, 2013

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Changes in the Santa Barbara Unified School District are continuing at a fast and furious pace, Superintendent David Cash told media at a back-to-school address on Monday. Among the district’s accomplishments over the past year, he listed the approval of a three-year strategic plan, a streamlined process for community use of school sites, implementation of 50 percent of the recommendations in a report on special education, an overhauled web page, and a bilingual state of the schools address.

Speaking of facilities, construction is underway at campuses across the district. Projects include new play areas at Open Alternative School and an upgraded gymnasium at Santa Barbara High School, where almost everything but the walls have been replaced. Workers were ready to paint lines for basketball and volleyball courts last Thursday. Painting was also about to get underway at new parking and rec areas at Santa Barbara Junior High School; the school was built on a swamp, and the areas needed reinforcement. Maybe most importantly, new restrooms are being installed at Peabody Charter School, Harding University Partnership School, and Adelante Charter School.

The district is also hoping to sell another $55 million worth of bonds within the month to raise funds for further construction. While showing off the $800,000 site work at Adelante, facilities manager David Hetyonk said the new bond money was much needed. “As a facilities person,” he said, “we’re always short of money.” He knows that because this year, the district completed an audit of its facilities via the consulting firm Telacu.

What nobody is quite sure of, however, is how much money the district will receive from the state. This year, Governor Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula will be implemented. In concept, no districts should receive less money than they did during the 2012-2013 year. However, Santa Barbara Unified benefited from a onetime influx of $8 million mostly from the dissolution of redevelopment agencies that the state has not erased but subtracted from its baseline number. Business boss Meg Jetté was in Sacramento last week lobbying for the district. Cash said they are currently planning for a status quo budget.

No matter the money, he is charging ahead with new initiatives. The Restorative Justice pilot program at Santa Barbara Junior High School will be expanded to the other three junior high schools and Santa Barbara High School. Cash announced that a one-to-one iPad pilot program will be instituted at four campuses this year, but administration has not yet settled on which four.

On top of all that, teachers will continue to learn the Common Core State Standards, which will introduce the most significant changes to classroom instruction since 1998. The purpose of the new standards is to emphasize connections between and continuity within subject areas. They also focus on depth over breadth. California schools have two years to implement the new standards, during which Cash said his teachers will divide that task into four quarters: Learning the standards, assessing instructional materials, improving instruction, and adding technology to “learning environments.”

Meanwhile, Cash and his lieutenants are continuing to focus on issues of equity throughout the district. There is still a pervasive achievement gap between “underprivileged Hispanic students” and “privileged white students,” said Cash, a significant portion of which can be blamed on “systemic barriers.” That includes disproportionate suspension rates. So far the district has tried to include more texts that reflect the demographics of its students, made an effort to reclassify more English learners as English proficient, and begun the discussion about how to increase the participation of English learners in Gifted and Talented courses. “We’ve nibbled around the edges,” said Cash, but some hard scrutiny is in order, he suggested.

While doing all of this, teachers also face a major shakeup in their internal organization, a detail Cash did not include in his address. The new union contract does away with department chairs. In their stead, each department will have multiple Professional Learning Community (PLC) leaders, who will facilitate weekly sessions during which teachers of the same courses share data and set goals. The purpose of PLCs is to help teachers collaborate and make the level of their instruction more uniform. Leaders will be paid a stipend.

Comments

it never ends, does it. No matter how many taxes we pass every year for schools, the story is always one of relentless education funding peril.

Schools should have budgeted as promised after the passage of the last two additional parcel taxes, on top of the 8 other bond issues or parcels taxes that are already garnishing our property tax bills.

Just last year voters were guaranteed to fix the latest cries of funding gaps. Now rather than call any extra Prop 30 money a bonus, this too is presented as ongoing funding peril. Tired of this.

Sober up, SBUSD. And sober up local media in how you tell the education funding story.

No new ideas here. Like Foo says, it never ends. Every couple of years it's another demand for yet more $$$ with the assurance about how the money will go a long way in helping the schools, but the help never seems to come. It's like turning up the water faucet when water isn't getting to the sprinkler when in fact the water is leaking out the hose.

And of course, the race issue. "Privileged White students" is code for racist system that discriminates against nonwhite students. Why the "achievement gap"? Simple: Low expectations placed on students from Spanish-speaking families. Example given: Having to have a bilingual state of the schools address. Lowering the standards does not help the people the schools claim to represent, nor does demonizing others as being "privileged".

Like Foo says, "it never ends", and as others have said "the true definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results each time." I agree.

Now we get the news today SBUSD test scores went down - guess all the extra money did not make a difference after all. How about tracking where it actually went and how that was supposed to make a difference in the first place?

State wide test scores show high achievement rates for Asians, so it is not just "privileged white students" who do well. Poor, immigrant, english learning Asians do just as well as "privileged whites" and even more so.

Until we get rid of the its cool to be dumb peer pressures we find on our local campuses, we will not see this local ethnic disparity change. The current hate American success mentality that is all too prevalent in this town and has distorted our own local educational outcomes.

When achievement is deemed "too white" we have sown the seeds of our own destruction.

Good point Foo. The "progressives" and the academic world won't touch the peer pressure issue with a ten-foot-pole. When I went to Santa Barbara High School I saw how Mexican nerds, or the term in those days was "edge" (word to describe someone who got good grades) were ostracized as "acting white" and I never remember anything being said about it from the teachers.

The public schools plan for failure, then complain about the results their own policies have created. If these people were true liberals, they'd realize that the best way to battle racism in America is through education and assimilation--as Jews and Asians have.

Start by NOT treating Spanish-speaking parents as though they were intellectually helpless people. This can be accomplished by allowing them to leave the monolinguistic nest of bilingual services. This way, they would be able to learn English like every other language group in the U.S. Slaveowners didn't allow Blacks to learn how to read because they knew tha literacy would give them power, so how do Cash and his "lieutenants" expect people who can't communicate in the language--much less be able to read in it--to succeed againt the backdrop of history I've presented?

Yea, I too hate those privileged white over achievers that are not in gangs, get good grades in school, and go on to college...What the hell is wrong with these Caucasian morons?I think we should bring in a load of Coolies, have them build a new water tunnel or something, and then watch as their kids, the products of indentured minority slaves, go on in 1 generation to get better grades than the privileged white kids. It would be kinda fun to listen to the new excuses from Latino's and their apologists.

Are these comments for real ? or does the news of budget cuts to education never get to the public?

"The recession's impact on American education has not yet dissipated, as more than half of states are slashing their education budgets this year.

According to a new analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 26 states will spend less per pupil in fiscal year 2013 than the year before, and 35 are still spending at levels lower than before the recession, after adjusting for inflation."

"He said that in addition to the state’s demographic challenges, the schools had been hampered by “a sustained disinvestment in public education, made all the more severe by the Great Recession.”

California’s struggles were not confined to Hispanic students. Over all, the state’s fourth and eighth graders underperformed the national average in reading, math and science. One bright spot in the state came from gains shown by black students in fourth-grade reading and math scores over two decades."

I would say that there is a distinct under-performance in the level of news knowledge in the commentary thus far.

agreed, tabatha... for one thing, food knows little about education, his specialty is bawling about taxes. BC, the plain facts are that Calif. public school funding is certainly NOT back to 2008 levels so your complaint that "Every couple of years it's another demand for yet more $$$ with the assurance about how the money will go a long way " makes little sense. SBCC offered a summer session, UCSB has offered more classes, there has been positive changes. Prop 30 NEVER guaranteed to "fix everything" - it simply reversed years of declining state support for public education. We need a Prop. 31 and 32.

Follow the money when others make demands for more money for education. The education industry in this state is already get plenty. Time now to demand results, and stop squandering massive amounts of education dollars already being put on the table.

Time also to clean up teacher training programs at CSU which fail by any national criteria for quality. More of the state education dollars wasted.

CSU training lousy teachers, who keep turning our lousy students and everyone demands more money which has yet to make a difference at any stage or any amount.